Why won't communism/socialism die?  How many need to be killed?  It's already well into the hundreds of millions of direct deaths caused by communism. Yet, still, so many still cling to its philosophies.

Socialism, after all, is just communism-lite.  And LOTS of people still believe in socialism.  In fact, it could easily be argued, that socialism is by far the most popular form of government on the planet.  Every modern country, to one degree or another, is socialist.

Socialists like to think that all they are is really nice people.  They think it isn't nice that you have money and don't give it to people who have less money.  So they force you to, at the barrel of a gun.  Real nice.

Whether on purpose or purely by accident, CNBC (the US Version at least, CNBC Europe and CNBC Asia sometimes have decent content) is a dangerous cesspool of misinformation and lies that can only serve one useful purpose: to see what kind of information Mom & Pop investor are receiving so you can place yourself on the opposite side of the trade.

It’s best to limit total annual exposure to CNBC to about 30 minutes.  For about 2 to 5 minutes per month I hold my breath and pinch my nose and avail myself of the utter sewage these people spew into the airwaves.

As readers know I have spent the last few weeks in South America.  In that time I have been in Lima (Peru), Asuncion (Paraguay), Santa Cruz (Bolivia) and Cafayate (Argentina).

I have come away with a lot of excellent information - most of which I'll be sending to subscribers in a special report and commenting on one country on this trip I found to be absolutely fantastic.  I will write more on that in the April issue of TDV on, purely coincidentally, April Fool's Day.

What a few days it has been.  It was and continues to be a humanitarian disaster of grand proportions - and one that happened on an island where there is more high end video and cellphone cameras than almost anywhere in the world - bringing us photos and videos that are both shocking and incredible.

The Bank of Japan has plunged in as all central banks are wont to do in this day and age, thinking it is somehow "helping" by counterfeiting trillions of Yen, but no amount of money printing can change reality - in fact it can only make things worse at it distorts price signals which investors use to make decisions on where to allocate scarce resources.