Chris Arreola and Vitali Klitschko weighed in today for their heavyweight fight which occurs tomorrow. Arreola tried to have a little fun at the expense of all the people who said he was a fat, overweight fighter. Here’s the video:

Arreola looked better than he has in the past few fights, but he’s still at least ten pounds heavier than he should be. Here’s the fight prediction from Bad Left Hook. I predict either an early knockout of Arreola or a boring Klitschko decision.

Today was an extremely irritating day. Here’s a short list of all the things that irritated me today:

• Pervasive smell of popcorn at work. I hate the smell of popcorn, and when somebody makes it at work it’s impossible to avoid. Plus, burning popcorn is the number one cause of false fire alarms at work. Popcorn should be banned!
• Guy in men’s room talking on his phone at urinal throughout his entire “visit.” I have no idea what the guy on the other end of the call thought was going on. To cap it off, cell phone guy didn’t wash his hands on the way out. And, he needed to wash them. The phone was tucked under his shoulder; not held in hand.
• Women on train burbling into her cell phone and giving some poor victim an extended review of the wine tasting she went to last night. Ever since I worked in a wine store in college, I have hated having to listen to idiots go on about “blackberry undertones” and “woody elements.”
• Insane Russian woman in next seat who used the excuse of asking if the train stopped at Palo Alto to launch into a 45 minute monologue on the unfairness of asking her to take an AIDs test before she came to America.
• Old guy sitting next to me who was not only a serial cougher who never covered his mouth, but was also apparently a student of the Larry Craig wide stance school of sitting.
• Lastly, myself, for being too stupid to think of changing out of my work shoes prior to cleaning up fifty pounds of rotting apples from my garden.
• In addition, an honorable mention goes to Mager for tweeting about how pleasant his train ride was during my train ride from hell.

In any event, tomorrow can only get better.

So, Orly Taitz has released a picture of what is purportedly a certified copy of a Kenyan birth certificate for Barack Obama. You can see it at WorldNet Daily. Before everyone gets too excited, here’s a few things to consider:

• Kenya didn’t become a republic until December 1964. The birth certificate is dated in February 1964.
• Reportedly, the name of the certifying clerk, E.F Lavender, is also the name of a common detergent in Kenya
• The certificate# 44 0 47 is laughable: 44 = he’s the 44th US President, O = Obama & 47 = his age.
• The book number listed is 44B. That’s 44 – he’s the 44th US President, B = Barack.

All in all, a lot of suggestions it’s a fake.

CLIMB ATTACK from Will Roegge on Vimeo.

If you want to understand why the stimulus will fail, just read Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s article in the Telegraph entitled Bond Market Calls Fed’s Bluff As World Falls Apart. As Ambrose points out:

The yield on 10-year US Treasury bonds “the world’s benchmark cost of capital“ has jumped from 2pc to 3pc since Christmas despite efforts to talk the rate down.

This level will asphyxiate the US economy if allowed to persist, as Fed chair Ben Bernanke must know. The US is already in deflation. Core prices “stripping out energy“ fell at an annual rate of 2pc in the fourth quarter. Wages are following. IBM, Chrysler, General Motors, and YRC, have all begun to cut pay.

The “real” cost of capital is rising as the slump deepens. This is textbook debt deflation. It was not supposed to happen. The Bernanke doctrine assumes that the Fed can bring down the whole structure of interest costs, first by slashing the Fed Funds rate to zero, and then by making a “credible threat” to buy Treasuries outright with printed money.

Mr Bernanke has been repeating this threat since early December. But talk is cheap. As the Fed hesitates, real yields climb ever higher. Plainly, the markets do not regard Fed rhetoric as “credible” at all.

Who can blame bond vigilantes for going on strike? Nobody wants to be left holding the bag if and when the global monetary blitz succeeds in stoking inflation. Governments are borrowing frantically to fund their bail-outs and cover a collapse in tax revenue. The US Treasury alone needs to raise $2 trillion in 2009.

Where is the money to come from? China, the Pacific tigers and the commodity powers are no longer amassing foreign reserves ($7.6 trillion). Their exports have collapsed. Instead of buying a trillion dollars of extra bonds each year, they have become net sellers. In aggregate, they dumped $190bn over the last fifteen weeks.

The Fed has stepped into the breach, up to a point. It has bought $350bn of commercial paper, and begun to buy $600bn of mortgage bonds. That helps. But still it recoils from buying Treasuries, perhaps fearing that any move to “monetise” Washington’s deficit starts a slippery slope towards an Argentine fate. Or perhaps Bernanke doesn’t believe his own assurances that the Fed can extract itself easily from emergency policies when the cycle turns.

Now, the stimulus is going to add another $800 billion to the borrowings, and who knows how much Geithner’s “Bad Bank” plan will add in addition. Borrowing of that much money is bound to increase interest rates even more. And that increase will directly counter a stimulus bill that is already badly constructed to produce immediate benefits.

The following was written in the 1930s:

“The general shape of this universal delusion [that is, credit] may be indicated by three of its familiar features.. First, the idea that the panacea for debt is credit.. The burden of Europe’s private debt to this country now is greater than the burden of her war debt; and the war debt, with arrears of interest, is greater than it was the day the peace was signed.. Debt was the economic terror of the world when the war ended. How to pay it was the colossal problem. Yet you will hardly find a nation, state, city, town or region that has not multiplied its debt since the war. The aggregate of this increase is prodigious, and a very high proportion of it represents recourse to credit to avoid payment of debt.

“Second, a social and political doctrine, now widely accepted, beginning with the premise that people are entitled to certain betterments of life. If they cannot immediately afford them.. nevertheless people are entitled to them, and credit must provide them.. Result: Probably one half of all government, national and civic, in the area of western civilization is either bankrupt or in acute distress from having over-borrowed according to this doctrine.. Now as credit fails and the standards of living tend to fall from the planes on which credit for a while sustained them, there is political dismay.. When [people] have been living on credit beyond their means the debt overtakes them. If they tax themselves to pay it, that means going back a little. If they repudiate their debt, that is the end of their credit. In this dilemma the ideal solution, so recommended even to the creditor, is more credit, more debt.

“Third, the argument that prosperity is a product of credit, whereas from the beginning of economic thought it had been supposed that prosperity was from the increase and exchange of wealth, and credit was its product.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

A picture from a time much longer ago than I care to remember:

I made an English curry with the leftover roast beef from Christmas the other day. It’s important to stress the English part of this recipe: it’s not Indian. As the Wikipedia points out:

Curry powder is a mixture of spices of widely varying composition developed by the British during their colonial rule of India.

The word “Karhee” or “Kadhi” from which “curry” is derived, comes from Southern India and refers to a sauce of any kind. “Curry powder” was developed by the British, who wished to take the taste of Indian food home, without having to utilize fresh spices. As a result “curry powder” in the Western world has a fairly standardized taste, but there are literally millions of curry flavors in India.

My mother used to make this all the time with leftover meat when I was a child, so I thought I would do the same. Here’s the recipe:

Chop up one large onion, and two large apples (peeled and cored). Saute them in a pot in oil with a lot of Madras curry powder. Add a lot of chopped up leftover roast beef, lamb or chicken, and continue to saute until the onions are well done. Add a bunch of water and simmer for 20 minutes, or until you have a thick soup.

Serve over rice with chopped bananas, raisins, peanuts, shredded coconut, and Major Grey’s Chutney on the side.

It will get hotter over time, so if it is spicy when you first make it, it will be spicier tomorrow.

Check out this video from Jim Cramer in which he admits the current market is rigged, and that trust is breaking down. His solution: more regulation. If they are calling for more regulation on CNBC, then you know that change is coming. Unfortunately, that change will, in the end, make no difference.
It will make no difference, because this economic system will end the way every other system based on a debased or fiat currency has ended: with a crash. If you look at history, you will find that every time fiat money has been used, it has failed. And, it has failed the same way, with a wave of debt, speculation and inflation.