A Trillion Dollars

here's a million dollars in $100 bills

But how much is a trillion dollars? $1,000,000,000,000 - a million million.  But what would it look like in cash? Someone's drawn up a really interesting diagram to put it in perspective.

hat tip: Whaleoil

The Party's Over

writes Pat Buchanan at Yahoo News. Below are a few excerpts from his excellent article - well worth reading.

"The Crash of 2008, which is now wiping out trillions of dollars of our people's wealth, is, like the Crash of 1929, likely to mark the end of one era and the onset of another.

The new era will see a more sober and much diminished America. The "Omnipower" and "Indispensable Nation" we heard about in all the hubris and braggadocio following our Cold War victory is history...

..."Government must save us!" cries the left, as ever. Yet, who got us into this mess if not the government — the Fed with its easy money, Bush with his profligate spending, and Congress and the SEC by liberating Wall Street and failing to step in and stop the drunken orgy?...

...Yet, still, the promises of the politicians come. Barack Obama will give us national health insurance and tax cuts for all but that 2 percent of the nation that already carries 50 percent of the federal income tax load.

John McCain is going to cut taxes, expand the military, move NATO into Georgia and Ukraine, confront Russia and force Iran to stop enriching uranium or "bomb, bomb, bomb," with Joe Lieberman as wartime consigliere.

Who are we kidding?

What we are witnessing today is how empires end."

Zimbabweans Resort to Bartering

The situation in Zimbabwe is deteriorating rapidly. I can't understand why everyone seems to have a lot to say about it, but nothing is being done, and the citizens of that country are just trying to make it til tomorrow. Below is an article that Lyd forwarded to me,

"I popped out for a Z$25,000 loaf of bread last Friday. It had gone up to Z$30,000 dollars. I ran home for the extra, ran back to the shop - and the price of my loaf had risen to Z$44,000. That's life in Zimbabwe today - or at least it was, until this week when our government took bold and decisive action to reduce the inflatory spiral, and predictably everything got even worse straight away. Perhaps alarmed by the forecasts of doom issuing from the lips of American ambassadors and others, the government decided that the simplest way to cut prices was to... well, cut prices. An order went out to all manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers to slash their prices by half. Any who showed the slightest reluctance to do so were visited by the Green Bombers - young graduates from the Zanu-PF terror camps whose economic arguments are enforced with a smack on the head with a stout stick. Those shops that obeyed the edict and reduced their prices were invaded by fervent shoppers, and the result was chaos, with many businesses threatening to close their doors for the rest of the week at least, if not for good. And the end result? Where it worked best, where prices were cut by a genuine 50 per cent, the government succeeded in reducing the cost of living to almost exactly what it was 10 days ago..."

Make sure to read the rest of the article here at www.thefirstpost.co.uk

The UN should go in and burn Robert Mugabe's playhouse down.