anoth­er doomed Tow­er of Babel

There is an expres­sion in Que­bec that says: “Big Corvette, small...” well, you know what.

I like it when pow­er­ful peo­ple can’t help but to express them­selves. Was there any­thing else to be expect­ed from this mar­vel­lous Prince?

That just made my day.

This arti­cle is incor­rect. The WTC tow­ers were only the tallest build­ings in the world from 1971 to 1973, when in 1973 it was superced­ed as the tallest build­ing by the Willis Tow­er (also called Sears Tow­er) in Chica­go, when it was the tallest build­ing in the world until 1998. In 1998 it was superced­ed by the Petronas Twin Tow­ers which were the tallest build­ings in the world from 1998 till 2004. In 2004 the Petronas Tow­ers sta­tus was superced­ed by Taipei 101, which was the tallest build­ing in the world until 2010, when it was sur­passed by the Burj Khal­i­fa, which is cur­rent­ly the tallest build­ing in the world. My point is, the WTC tow­ers have not been the tallest build­ings in the world since 1974.

Prince Alwaleed has a new inter­view in Forbes...there are a lot of gems in there, but I think this is my favorite...Newt and Bub­ba, those were the good ‘ol days:

Forbes
Sau­di Bil­lion­aire Alwaleed: This End Of Amer­i­ca Talk Is Baloney
3/08/2012 @ 11:39AM

...

Forbes: What do you think about the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly as one of the biggest investors in the coun­try? You spoke recent­ly about the polit­i­cal eco­nom­ic mess the U.S. has got­ten itself into.

Prince Alwaleed: I read [Thomas Friedman’s] book called, “What Went Wrong,” and it talks about Islam’s Arabs. Frankly speak­ing, a book should be writ­ten about the Unit­ed States, “What Went Wrong?” With all the strength, the pow­er, the lead­er­ship the Unit­ed States has eco­nom­i­cal­ly, finan­cial­ly, admin­is­tra­tive and polit­i­cal­ly. With the dol­lar still being the reserve cur­ren­cy of the whole world, Unit­ed States is still great. But the polit­i­cal anar­chy, the polit­i­cal polar­iza­tion that you have in the Unit­ed States right now, has real­ly become a mock­ery, frankly speak­ing. We have the Democ­rats who just want to get Repub­li­cans. The Repub­li­cans want to get Democ­rats. It nev­er used to hap­pen before. We had Rea­gan had a Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­gress. Clin­ton had a Repub­li­can con­gress. And they clicked well togeth­er.

I remem­ber, Rea­gan had “Tip” O’Neill, if I remem­ber well. And Clin­ton had Gin­grich. And they use to click well and they use to have agree­ments. And bipar­ti­san­ship. You have huge chal­lenges polit­i­cal­ly, eco­nom­i­cal­ly, finan­cial­ly. Look at the twin deficits you have right now, espe­cial­ly the bud­get deficit. It’s going to equal the GDP, which is a very dan­ger­ous thing.

There are solu­tions for that mat­ter if they put aside all the bick­er­ing and go back to the basics of run­ning the nation in a uni­form man­ner. I think the Unit­ed States is down, but not out, pro­vid­ed that the polit­i­cal sys­tem stops being bro­ken.

...

@Claude: Could­n’t help but laugh at that, giv­en that the Corvette is per­haps my most favorite piece of Amer­i­can auto­mo­tive machin­ery. =D

@J. Lau­d­er­milk: That’s true. Still though, I got­ta won­der who’s gonna be next on the big build­ing list......=p