The Avalon
July 19th, 2010
Archive
Archive for the ‘Contractual Obligation’ Category
Economic Hitman
April 29th, 2010
I made my first purchases on Amazon recently. I have no idea how they can sell them so much below the cover price; either the publisher is taking a hit or we are in the book stores.
Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man Link
Perkins, a former chief economist at Boston strategic-consulting firm Chas. T. Main, says he was an “economic hit man” for 10 years, helping U.S. intelligence agencies and multinationals cajole and blackmail foreign leaders into serving U.S. foreign policy and awarding lucrative contracts to American business. “Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars,” Perkins writes. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is an extraordinary and gripping tale of intrigue and dark machinations.
Perkins details the manipulation of countries whereby they agree to infrastructure projects which can never be paid back. The infrastructure contracts enrich the American corporations doing the work and enslave the country.
I’m up to Chapter 14 and I have to say, it’s a page turner. There have been many blanks filled in around the Saudi Arabian – American relationship, the Panama Canal and the Iranian hostage crisis. It’s a really good read.
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April 22nd, 2010
Some observant readers may have noticed that I’ve joined a Flickr group put together by some of the guys at work. As I understand it, Take 52 was to encourage us to take pictures every week and then upload at least one to the group.
Much to my amazement, I’ve uploaded 11 weeks in a row and near as I can tell, the only reason for that is that I make sure I do it the same time every week. It’s not always pretty and very often I’m running around at the last minute looking for something to photograph.
The point being, the scheduling and forced deadline help to make it happen.
And now, a sufficiently strange Korean commercial…
Peppers
March 1st, 2010
A last minute shot for week 4 of Take 52. While I decided to go with a vegetable theme, I decided against posting shots of my co-workers…
Korea 2009 :: Day 3
September 25th, 2009
Today was a busy and eventful day for us. We met Mihwa’s old friends from LG for lunch and then went to GeunCheon to do some clothes shopping.
Just before we left the Co-op, Mihwa asked me if I had been using the hair dryer. It was freakishly hot for something which hasn’t been used. “I’ll unplug it…” Try as I might, I wasn’t able to unplug it from the wall. I was really pulling on the plug and this thing wasn’t budging. This had fail written all over it…
Now the bathroom is about a metre square and the sink, shower and toilet occupy the whole space. Hence, the floor was still wet from my shower.
I don’t want to get into the stupidity of using a hair dryer in a bathroom where everything is wet but it is what it is. The dryer was really hot and we weren’t feeling very good about leaving the room with a hair dryer that was about to combust.
We (and by we, I mean Mihwa) called the front desk and in no time a repair guy was in our room. He explained that he needed to remove the electrical outlet as they had to glue the hair dryers into the wall to prevent the Chinese students from walking off with them. I looked at the plug and sure enough, a huge glob of glue on the end.
“You can take it; we aren’t using the hair dryer…”
Flickr
