Expand Your Horizons with a Sanibel Condominium

Sanibel Real Estate

Many people are faced with a dull and regimented life, spending their days following a routine that doesn’t really lead to anywhere or amount to anything. Prospects can change however, especially if those prospects involve a good Sanibel condominium.

What is your daily routine? Some people have a severely restricted routine that it’s almost laughable if not pitiable. For example, a student would have himself woken up in the morning by his alarm clock. He spends the next few minutes thinking about the comfort of bed and why he needs more sleep. Only to be bribed or cajoled out of bed by his mom and rushes to gulp down a coffee and breakfast in order to be in time for school. At school he listens to the teacher talk and talk. After school, he goes home where he eats his dinner and readies himself for the comfort of bed where he dreams of swimming freely in the oceans beyond the limitations of the neighborhood. This is a serious case of need for break from the numbing routine.

An employee could be experiencing the exact same thing except that he has his work in place of school. It’s a sad thing because most of these guys only have their weekends for fun and games and it’s never enough. There are inevitably additional projects or overtime that encroach on this precious free time. So they won’t have the spare time to travel to the beach and enjoy the sunset.

Living in a Sanibel condominium puts an end to all that drudgery and allows much more time for fun and games. Sanibel is best known for its beautiful beaches and sub-tropical climate. You can enjoy the feel of soft white sand beneath your feet as you play a swift game of volleyball with your buddies. Or you could spend your time relaxing and removing yourself from the stress of work by having a day building sand castles, shelling, or having a romantic stroll along the shore.

If you really want to have options, then you should know that most condos are situated within the center of the area, providing access to virtually every amenity. You could rent a bike and start riding all around town using the many trails available. You could play tennis in the nearby courts or enjoy a round of golf in one of the many courses around. There are more golf courses in Florida than in any other country so you’re spoilt for choice.

After a tiring work-out or an exhausting game, it’s time to refresh and recharge your batteries with a nice meal from any of the restaurants in the town. What you choose do to with your time is entirely up to you. There is something for every taste here, so there is no excuse not to visit.

You can’t possibly be chained to a dull routine when you live in a Sanibel condominium with all the choices spread around you. The main problem is going to be deciding what to do!

IRAN: Ahmadinejad’s Predicament and Iran’s Political Crisis

Analysis by Farideh Farhi*
Daniel Saltman

HONOLULU, Hawaii, Aug 10 (IPS) - With the confirmation of his re-election by Ayatollah Khamenei and his oath of office taken, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will begin his second term facing much steeper challenges than any of Iran’s previous second-term presidents.

In fact, despite the proclaimed support of 24 million Iranians, his government is by far the weakest post-revolutionary government. Ironically, it is this weakened position that tempts him to be a force of constant agitation and confrontation.

Challenges facing Ahmadinejad include open hostility from a large section of the Iranian elite which Ayatollah Khamenei characterised in Ahmadinejad’s confirmation speech as "angry and wounded"; highly charged criticisms of his appointments and policies from within the conservative ranks; continued civil disobedience; a public mood that has turned from mostly inattentive and apolitical to concerned and angry; general unhappiness among the clergy about the harsh crackdown; and a much more hostile international environment.

All this is on top of serious economic woes that he was unable to address during his first term - as he had promised to do in his 2005 campaign.

Prior to the June election, Ahmadinejad had indeed attempted to implement a value-added tax on the sale of goods and introduce legislation to overhaul Iran’s over-bloated subsidy system - replacing it with more targeted cash subsidies to the poorer strata of society. These measures plus gradual price increases in utilities and fuel prices were meant to lower the government’s fiscal burden.

But, merchants resisted the implementation of the value-added-tax. His so- called Economic Transformation Plan was also roundly rejected prior to the campaign season as the conservative-controlled Majles - worried about the legislation’s inflationary impact and its unreliable or exaggerated data - chose to delay the discussion till the post-election period.

The political crisis that has ensued has effectively pushed economic concerns to the side, and brought to the forefront once again a whole set of political civil rights issues emphasised during former President Mohammad Khatami’s reformist era.
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Ahmadinejad could pursue his economic agenda while at the same time attempting to reduce political tensions generated by the election and its aftermath. This would entail a coordinated effort with other centres of power - including the office of the Leader and the Judiciary - to address some of the serious breaches of citizens’ rights that have occurred, finding those responsible for them, and putting in place mechanisms that would ensure against their repetition.

But Ahmadinejad’s personality - and the paranoid outlook of the security- oriented circles that surround him - make it unlikely that he will choose that route for fear that any sign of weakness will only worsen his predicament. The decision to put on trial past officials en masse under conditions that lacked the slightest trappings of due process is already an indication against such a conciliatory approach.

In foreign policy, Ahmadinejad’s approach to Iran’s unprecedented turbulences is likely to deem the best defence a strong offense.

In reaction to his polarising approach, efforts to influence, control or dislodge him will come from all corners of Iran’s political spectrum - making his already erratic managerial style even more haphazard and shifting, adding to his difficult position.

Foremost among his woes is popular protest combined with unprecedented cracks at the top of Iran’s political apparatus that show no sign of subsiding. For the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic, a president is faced with a combination of popular mobilisation and a squeeze from the top.

Squeeze at the top has always been a predicament of the office of Iran’s president, caught between non-elective institutions - robustly equipped with their own independent and often shadowy security and economic appendages - and a rancorous elected Parliament, whose only assertion of power in the Iranian political system can come in the form of confronting or harassing the president on domestic issues.

But the persistent social mobilisation from below is bound to make the squeeze at the top even more difficult to manage because of the intensity of pressures coming from challengers, critics, and even avid supporters.

Ahmadinejad’s supporters are already calling for more heads to roll over election events, demanding that some of the most celebrated figures of the Islamic Republic - including Mir Hossein Mussavi, and former presidents Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani - be put on trial for their collusion with external powers to stage a Velvet Revolution against the Islamic Republic.

Ahmadinejad’s challengers - riding on popular sentiments that have gone beyond indignation over election fraud and turned into an even more visceral outrage over the harsh crackdown in the streets, torture and deaths in prisons for which no one is willing to take responsibility - have already turned their movement into one pursuing an end to the arbitrary rule of Iran’s many shadowy instruments of repression.

The strategy of this Green Movement, according to Mussavi, will be inspired by a "slogan that in its expansiveness includes the largest number of Iranians both inside and outside of Iran." There is persistent emphasis on the political and civil guarantees in the Islamic Constitution that "have remained vanquished" and the insistence that those engaged in the crackdown "are the ones that are breaking the structure" of the Islamic Republic.

This constitutionalist approach is deemed the most effective in creating further cleavages between the government and its conservative critics.

Ahmadinejad has never been very popular even among conservatives, but recent events have created further worries among them about his ability to manage the tide of protests and letting them subside.

To be sure, similar worries exist regarding Ayatollah Khamenei - whose wholehearted support of Ahmadinejad has effectively transformed him, in the public mind, as the real source of the harsh crackdown. However, as the chief executive officer of the country, Ahmadinejad is the one who ultimately has to face the brunt of criticisms regarding the way popular protests are confronted, prisoners treated, and civil rights undermined.

In any case, he is a much easier target to attack without being accused of questioning the foundation of the Islamic Republic.

In trying to find a Modus Vivendi to placate popular anger against his presidency, Ahmadinejad’s first task will have to be the selection of a team that can reach an agreement about how to deal with the situation. And this may not be an easy task, as one of his weaknesses as a leader has always been his inability to work well with people outside of a very close circle of friends.

In his first term he had to spend almost nine months trying to get approval for key ministers in his cabinet. And by the end of his first term, close to half of his cabinet had been either sacked or had chosen to resign. He also changed the heads of key institutions such as the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) several times, and at the end managed even to antagonise the most hard-line of his ministers at the Intelligence and Culture and Islamic Guidance ministries.

This is why two major conservative organisations - Followers of Imam and Leadership Line and Society of Islamic Engineers - have already issued unprecedentedly harsh letters warning Ahmadinejad against obstinacy, not listening to anyone, and having delusions about the extent and depth of the support he has been given. Instead they called upon him to avoid "confronting the clergy," and to rely on the views of "Majles and Leadership" in choosing his cabinet.

Ahmadinejad’s options are limited. He can acknowledge his weakened presidency, over-see a cabinet whose individual members will contest his policies, and head an administration that is conflicted from within. Or he can try to try to act resolutely by picking fights with almost every political force in the country - in which case his behaviour will be the source of heartache for everyone who for ideological reasons or for fear of reformist resurgence ended up supporting him in the election.

*Farideh Farhi is an Independent Scholar and Affiliate of the Graduate Faculty of Political Science at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

(END/2009)

President Obama returns to Chicago

SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio - President Obama left the Cleveland area and an afternoon of health care reform events for two Democratic National Committee fundraisers in Chicago, where he struck a defensive and at times defiant tone about his top priority.

After touching down in his home city for the third time since taking office, Obama first attended a $15,200-a-person dinner at the Lincoln Park home his campaign fundraiser Penny Pritzker, where he took a shot at the media for what he deemed its "lack of sustained focus on the facts" concerning health care reform, which he said "makes it very difficult" for him.

Then he moved on to an event at the Hyatt Regency, where he defiantly told a crowd of about 750 donors, "We are going to pass health care reform in 2009."

And he used the backdrop of the street-fighter politics that define his home city to fire back at his Republican critics — one of whom, Sen. Jim DeMint, he said has told the GOP that defeating health care reform would “break” Obama.

Let me tell you something," Obama said. "I'm from Chicago. I don't break."

Obama tried to put the best face on the setback to his reform plans he was dealt Thursday, after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's announcement.

"So even though we still have a few issues to work out, what's remarkable about this point is not how far we have left to go, it's how far we've already come," Obama said.

"I understand how easy it is for folks in Washington to become consumed by the game of politics."

He did his fair share of criticizing Washington and "the status quo" on health care, and declared the country to be "at an unmistakable crossroad."

"There's some in Washington who want us to go down the path that we've already traveled for the last decade or so," Obama said, "the path where we just throw up our hands and say, 'Oh this is just too tough.'"

Earlier Obama worked a room of over 100 people and posed for pictures at Pritzker's home, where guests nibbled on gazpacho shooters and watermelon salad.

He told the donors that opposition to his health care reform bill "gets on my nerves. It frustrates me that we'd even be suggesting the status quo is the best we can do."

He also praised his administration, saying that it had "reset relations not just with Russia" but with the world.

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"Anti-Americanism is no longer fashionable," he said.

He made similar statements at the Hyatt fundraiser, where he also credited his administration with being able to "pull the economy back from the brink."

The Hyatt event was billed as a "Welcome Home" reception, where Obama met the coach and quarterback of the Chicago Bears — Lovie Smith and Jay Cutler — as well as retired Chicago Bulls point guard B.J. Armstrong and Tracy McGrady of the Houston Rockets.

"I'm honored to be a part of the welcoming group to welcome home my favorite son," Smith told the crowd. "I have the audacity of hope that the Chicago Bears will someday be visiting the White House giving the president a Chicago Bears football to toss around on the South Lawn."

Obama was basking in a sports glow after his favorite baseball team pitched a perfect game, and said somebody asked him which was a bigger deal: the White Sox's perfect game or the Dow going over 9,000.

"And I said I promise you, I promise you, a perfect game," Obama said. "That's big."

The president wrapped himself in the hometown welcome. Some of the first words he spoke during remarks at the Hyatt were, "It's good to be home."

"It has now been six months since Michelle and Sasha and Malia and Marian Robinson, my mother-in-law, said goodbye and moved into a nice little spot in Washington, D.C.," Obama said. "And we arrived there at an incredibly difficult moment in this country's history."

At one point in his remarks a woman yelled, "Give 'em hell, Barack."

Obama reiterated his pitch that "health insurance reform" is not just about the uninsured — although he said helping them is "a moral imperative" — but about lowering costs and increasing quality for Americans who have coverage.

The two events are expected to raise as much as $3 million for the DNC.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25368.html#ixzz0MD2bUFIz

Goldman’s Outrage

How the Wall Street giant used your money to make $3.4 billion in profits.

They will never admit to this at Goldman Sachs (they don’t really fess up to much over there at the Big G) but in the fall of 2008, just after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy gave the world a lesson in systemic risk, Goldman, the world’s greatest risk taker, was finished too.

That’s right, it was toast. Finished. Kaput. Until, that is, the firm that was built on wheeling and dealing in some of the most esoteric investments the world of high finance had ever seen, needed a government bailout to stay afloat, which included $10 billion in cash from the Treasury Department (granted by its former CEO, then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson) and more importantly, full access to the Federal Reserve’s discount window to be a commercial bank.

Goldman Sachs, which was bailed out by the federal government, is now using the bailout to resume some of the same risk-taking activity that got it in trouble in the first place.

Goldman, of course, is a commercial bank like no other. You won’t confuse Goldman with the ol’ Bailey Building & Loan. It has no customer deposits—which are what the access to the discount window was first set up to protect—and you won’t be getting a toaster or a debit card from Goldman Sachs anytime soon.

But being a bank has its rewards. With full access to the discount window, Goldman can now borrow cheaply and massively from the Fed in a pinch, and because of that access, it can borrow more cheaply in the credit markets. It’s a loophole that has allowed Goldman to turn back the clock and once again resume much of its risk-taking activities, only this time it’s being financed by the American taxpayer.

There are, of course, many urban legends about Goldman and how it uses its clout in Washington and in the financial business (both Paulson and another former CEO, Robert Rubin held the Treasury secretary post) to advance its allegedly nefarious corporate agenda.

Recent reports have the firm gaming the energy markets, creating the dot-com bubble, and the subprime-debt crisis that took down Wall Street, and then for a time benefitting from its implosion when it “shorted” subprime-related investments, a trade that allowed the bank to profit from the downward spiral. (Hell, I’m sure there are people who also believe Goldman was somehow behind the swine-flu epidemic to corner the market on drug stocks.)

Some of these stories have a basis in fact and some don’t—I’ll leave it up to the reader to figure this out—but what is true is equally disturbing: Goldman Sachs, which was bailed out by the federal government, is now using the bailout to resume the many of the same risk-taking activities that got it in trouble in the first place.

The question I have, of course, is why is the Obama administration, which has decried corporate greed whenever it’s politically feasible, allowed Goldman all the advantages of a bank, when it is really a big hedge fund?

The Treasury Department won’t say and it’s obvious why Goldman is doing what it is doing: Money, and lots of it. The firm announced Tuesday morning that net income for the second quarter was $3.44 billion, while its biggest rival, Morgan Stanley, is likely to announce a quarterly loss.

And it all comes down to risk, or to be more precise, how much risk Morgan is willing to take on the taxpayers’ dime compared to what Goldman Sachs is now taking. Morgan Stanley’s CEO John Mack, chastened by the firm’s own near-implosion last year when it too was forced to become a bank, has radically reduced the amount of borrowing, or “leverage,” Morgan is taking in trading. People inside the firm say it’s difficult to meet client demands without borrowing money.

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“We just can’t get anything done,” said one senior Morgan Stanley executive, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Borrowing to finance trades amplifies gains, but it also amplifies losses when trades go bad. During the first quarter of 2009, Morgan borrowed just $11 for every dollar it had in capital (by comparison during the Wall Street boom, firms borrowed as much as $35 for every dollar in capital), while Goldman borrowed a significantly higher amount—close to $15 for every dollar it has in capital. “Our leverage is the result of risk-taking on behalf of our clients,” Goldman spokesman Lucas van Praag says about the strategy.

And keep in mind this is only for the first quarter. Goldman’s second-quarter leverage is likely much higher given the fact that interest rates have remained remarkably low. Those low interest rates have had another benefit—it has allowed Goldman to make winning bets in the bond markets (bond prices rise when interest rates fall), the same place that decimated Wall Street in 2007 and 2008.

Of course, there are lots of reasons for Goldman’s success. The firm has amazing intellectual capital; some of the smartest people in the world of finance work there. It also knows how to game the system better than any firm on the face of the earth. Case in point: In mid-September 2008, when the world was crashing following Lehman’s bankruptcy, Goldman held $13 billion in highly risky mortgage bonds known as collateralized debt obligations. These bonds were insured by American International Group, which itself was about to go bankrupt.

Without that insurance, Goldman itself would have imploded because the bonds would have been marked down to just pennies on the dollar. The rescue of AIG was supposed to prevent a large-scale crash of the financial system, but it also prevented a crash of Goldman Sachs, which bought those crappy CDOs from Merrill Lynch, which was forced to find a buyer (Bank of America) because it too held the same sludge.

The Goldman purchase of the Merrill CDOs is proof positive that the geniuses at Goldman screw up like everyone else. And I don’t buy van Praag’s spin on the firm’s famous hedges that minimized its losses because the smart money in the markets didn’t at the time. Goldman’s shares were in a freefall, bottoming out at around $50 in the fall of 2008, compared to close to $235 just a year earlier.

Now with all the government help, Goldman is marching its way back up to $235 a share—trading at around $150 Monday—by embracing much of the same risk that nearly led to its demise. It would be nice, though, if the next time Goldman losses money taxpayers didn’t foot the bill.

Leaked Best Buy Memo Hints at Windows 7 Upgrade Pricing

Engadget has gotten its hands on what it is calling “a leaked internal memo” which outlines Best Buys plans for the roll out of Windows 7. In addition to giving us the timelines for free upgrades, it also spells out pre-order plans, and a look at the new pricing model. The memo which describes Windows 7 as “Vista that works”, will first be made available for pre-order by customers on June 26th.

Home Premium upgrades will start at $49.99, while the professional edition will be sold at $99.99. These prices (if true) are significantly more reasonable than Vista upgrades which started at $129.95 for Home Premium, and $199.95 for Business. Pre-ordered copies won’t ship until the official October 22nd launch date, but at least this guarantees you the pricing shown above.

In addition to pre-order sales, Best Buy also outlined its “Technology Guarantee Program” which will allow people who obtain copies of Vista after June 26th to receive a free upgrade. According to the memo, this will apply to both new PC sales, and retail copies bought separately. If this is true, this might be a good way to upgrade your PC to Windows Vista for next to nothing in the months leading up to 7’s release.

The moral of the story here is that if you were planning on buying a new PC from Best Buy, you should probably hold off until June 26th. If the contents of the memo are legitimate, this will likely be a painful lesson for Best Buy who will probably find it much more difficult to sell new PC’s for the next couple of weeks.

So, what do you think of the new upgrade pricing?

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Huffington Post: socialists or just sensible Americans?

“Well, we are out of money now…” President Obama, May 25, 2009

Depends on the definition of “we”.

We got into this crisis because Wall Street invented and pedaled fantasy financial instruments that turned out to be junk. While their party lasted, those complex derivatives were a gold mine for the largest financial institutions. According to the New York Times, the profits from the nine largest commercial banks “from early 2004 until the middle of 2007 were a combined $305 billion. But since 2007, those banks have marked down their valuations on loans and other assets by just over that amount.” In other words, the profits weren’t real.

When the fantasy finance bubble burst and all the fictional profits disappeared, the banks headed straight for mass bankruptcy. Had the government not intervened, many, if not all of them would have gone under, taking the world economy with them. To prevent a total meltdown, we’ve forked over several trillion dollars in bail outs, loan guarantees and stimulus funds.

But let’s back up a bit. What happened to the $305 billion of 2004 through 2007 bank profits that have since vanished from the banks’ balance sheets? About half were paid out in compensation to executives, managers and traders. Yes, amazing as it may seem, when you work for a large financial institution you can be paid massive sums even if your work ends up producing nothing — not even just nothing, but a negative result. All those autoworkers who are being blamed for the miseries of GM and Chrysler? They actually did make cars that are still transporting people. But the Wall Street players, who took home billions for supposedly making valuable financial instruments, were actually making economic weapons of mass destruction. And you can bet that much of their billions are safely parked in off-shore accounts and other low/no tax investments. In a sane and fair world, we would be thinking about how to get it back to help pay for the costs of cleaning up the toxic financial mess.

In a more general way, the bubble boom produced by those fantasy financial instruments helped create a slew of billionaires. As Obama likes to point out, “This is America. We don’t disparage wealth. We don’t begrudge anyone for achieving success.” But is there some limit beyond which success spills into obscene accumulation? At the very least we should be careful not to lose sight of how much money billionaires possess. In researching The Looting of America we tracked the wealth of the super-rich.

In 1982, the top 400 individuals held an average net worth of $604 million each (in 2008 dollars). By 1995, their average wealth jumped to $1.7 billion. And in 2008, the 400 top winners averaged $3.9 billion each…. The total for the 400 high rollers adds up to a cool $1.56 trillion. That’s equal to about 10 percent of the entire gross domestic product of the US…

We certainly could have a heated argument about how much of this wealth derived from the derivative-driven boom that just went bust. A case could be made that much of this money is ill-gotten since it came from artificial financial instruments that were rated improperly, or came from artificially leveraged transactions that now have crashed the system as a whole. An even more contentious fight would break out if we discussed whether there is any justification for allowing that such sums to accumulate in the hands of the few, no matter how worthy any of these individuals may be. And we could have us a row asking whether or not a democracy can really survive with so much wealth in the hands of so few people. But surely we can all agree that those top 400 are sitting on a huge pile of money, while our country is going deeply into debt to fix a financial system that has contributed mightily to their enrichment.

Here’s a dangerous thought. What if we had a very steeply progressive wealth/income tax that reduced the net worth of the super-rich to “only” about $100 million each? You wouldn’t be suffering if you had $100 million kicking around. Now do the math: The 400 richest x $100 million each would equal $40 billion. That would leave about $1.52 trillion to help pay back the country for the Wall Street meltdown that we, our children and their children will be subsidizing.

Maybe we’re not so out of money after all.

Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What we can do about it. (Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009)

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Humongous Earthworms

Humongous Earthworms

Is this real? If you have the stomach, click on the image to head to an image gallery and our very ordinary investigation.

So, are these photos real? And the answer, amazingly is… probably yes.

Here in Brazil we have our very own Minhocuçu (Rhinodrilus e Glossoscolex spp) which can easily grow beyond half a meter in length an almost an inch in diameter.

And it’s not by far the longest earthworm recorded.

The Microchaetidae family in South Africa is a group where all species can reach over a meter in length. This is no folk tale or cryptozoological rumor: specimens of this size have been duly recorded for over a century already.

And even those are not the champions. The title goes to the Megascolecidae family from Australia. The record: 2,1 meters by 24 millimeters thick.

The worms in the images all look they are up to a meter in length, compatible with the recorded dimensions for the many species of the families we discussed. They are probably real, though exactly from where and what species my ordinary investigation didn’t come up with. Specialists, do enlighten us with further confirmation and identification! The first image of a girl holding up one, for instance, may not be of an earthworm but of is a caecilian.

Giant earthworms are harmless, but perhaps because of their plain appearance and our instinctive disgust of them all kinds of legends are associated with them, even in places where we can’t find those “little” couple-meter-earthworms.

The most curious legend is not exactly about an earthworm, but of a worm. A death worm. The Mongolian Death Worm. It can allegedly kill its victims by either spraying a lethal and blinding venom, or sending electrical discharges.

In Brazil, where we do have our Minhocuçus, there’s also the legend of Minhocão, 25 meters in size. Like the Mongolian Death Worm, its not very plausible such a creature exists.

Earthworms over a couple of meters in length are real and they can more than make up for a mix of disgust and fascination. Not only they can harm nobody and are actually important part of the ecosystem, in Brazil they are in danger as they make really excellent fishing bait. This is no joke (link in Portuguese).

UPDATE: Identified! Well, at least the where and who for the second photo. It’s from Lisa B, available on her flickr account. As Lisa wrote in the comments below, “that image was taken in the Bellavista Cloud Forest Reserve in Ecuador, and it is indeed a real worm.” Thank you! Apologies for not including credit beforehand, I reproduced the original gallery from erueru, linked below, and I’m happy to include the sources.

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Sources
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