The subsidariat

The British press is far livelier than the US press. If I had to pick one title to live with, it would be The Guardian, altho and because I loath its politics. It is well designed and sometimes surprises. It's columns are often so grotesque (Polly Toynbee take a bow), that I get a freak-show frisson. My wife would choose The Daily Mail, a middle-brow, gossipy, somewhat palaeo-con, anti-Bush, anti-Blair tabloid. It has some of the best columnists like Richard Littlejohn, Melanie Phillips and Peter Hitchens. The Mail is the one politicians curtsy to. It used to be The Sun. The Mail has flourished under the editorship of Paul Dacre, a rather private man whom I knew slightly at school. He is the most influential editor in Britain, tho I suspect his animus against the Iraq war is driven by an animus against Blair which is driven by an animus against Cherie Blair which has a root cause we know not where. Here the BBC reports Dacre's thunderbolts.

An extract from elsewhere:

Dacre also accused the "subsidariat", a group in which he also placed the Times, Guardian and Independent, of being "consumed by the kind of political correctness that is patronisingly contemptuous of what it describes as ordinary people.

These papers take bribes from the state in the form of ads for the marauding army of social engineers which infests the UK, hence "subsidariat".

For an excruciatingly funny first-hand account of Grub Street in recent times, I recommend The Insider by Piers Morgan, editor of the Mirror, fired for publishing faked photos of British soldiers torturing Iraqis. His caddish, intimate witness to Murdoch, Diana and the Blairs will define them down the ages.

The sound of one shoe dropping

I'm running a short position in Apple stock and wrote here "The optics of the story are awful - backdated options grants, fictitious board meetings, Apple apparently lying outright to say that Jobs derived no value from the operation - but the market wants Jobs to get away with it (so do I in my heart) because he's so admirable...."

The market's discounting of Jobs's vulnerability was founded on an Apple board report exonerating Jobs, but if there's a smell test for whitewash, that report wouldn't pass it, tho the whitewash was applied by the Inventor of the Internet himself who may now be in line to be prosecuted. Anyone who bought Apple stock after the Gore report was published, may have a powerful case.

Since I placed my short last week the stock has dropped 10%, but after last night's close it emerges that the feds have questioned Jobs. Now the market may shrug this off, fairly reasoning that this Justice Department, which wouldn't prosecute Sandy Berger, lacks the balls to apply the law to Steve Jobs or Al Gore. But, you know what, greed is fully priced in Apple's stock and fear is a bouncing baby. Steve may look fetching announcing new products in an orange jumpsuit. Al Gore would look more fetching.

Why I love Steve Jobs (14 minutes).

UPDATE: Another day, another dollar (down).
Tomorrow's Times (London) runs an Apple story, US investigators condemn Apple's options inquiry. Extract - "An SEC source said: “To have a representative from the Department of Justice — a criminal prosecutor — attend an interview with a company CEO is a very serious matter. This is not a polite request for information. The way the interview was conducted and the way the investigation seems to be moving forward [suggest] that Apple has a lot more explaining to do before the authorities will even begin to be satisfied.”"

The Times (New York) website runs an Apple story about designs for mythical Apple products. Also a story in the Tech section about how HDTV is showing up too much detail in porn movies. Now why would the omitters of truth at the NYT be playing down what may be the biggest business story of the year ?

Options on the optics of options

Yesterday I shorted Apple stock by spread-betting long on $95 July puts with July at $98. I write this on a brand new Blackbook, recently added to my other 5 Macs. I love the idea of the iPhone and I am pretty sure that OS X (or its Unix based descendant) will displace Windows.

I used options, despite the high price of implied volatility, to be consistent with my rule of guaranteed stop-loss taking. I may very well be very wrong given that I'm trying to call the zenith of a rocket. I don't usually try to stop rockets or catch falling knives when I gamble in stocks or commodities, but this time there's something urgent in my thinking - Steve Jobs may be in deep doo-doo over the Apple options shenanigans. The optics of the story are awful - backdated options grants, fictitious board meetings, Apple apparently lying outright to say that Jobs derived no value from the operation - but the market wants Jobs to get away with it (so do I in my heart) because he's so admirable and there's so much money riding on Apple. So, if I'm right, the market is thinking egosyntonically and I, working with fingerspitzengefuhl + wit, will profit by sidestepping my own bias.

Oh, and a hell of a lot of good news is already in the price.

We'll see.

UPDATE: Apple stock fell 2.5% yesterday (good). After the close Apple announced spectacular Q4 figures, way ahead of expectations. The stock rose 5% in after hours trading (bad), then dropped back (good). Today's action will be interesting. Should the stock fail to surge or even close lower, that would be a classically significant repudiation of bull news (good). Should the stock do well, that would be normal and it will take a while to see what shakes out.

I remain an Apple fan, but not a fan of the stock price here and now. The undervalued bear factor is Jobs's vulnerability. The undervalued, but longer term bull factor is that Apple's Operating System will displace Windows.


UPDATE 2: It was an interesting day. Apple stock fell by over 6%.

Nuke Berlin

Russian/Belarussian disputes and shenanigans over energy prices and transit fees in the Druzhba ('Friendship') pipeline are jeapordizing German oil supplies, so there's a rethink about nuclear power. Intellectual meltdown ensues:

"Those who use oil shortages in order to propagate nuclear energy are not capable of intellectually comprehending the topic of energy supplies," said Ulrich Kelber, the deputy president of the SPD parliamentary bloc.

Members of the opposition Greens also protested the idea of making changes to the nuclear phase-out.

"With uranium, you can neither heat your homes nor fuel your cars," said Jürgen Trittin, a Greens politician.

Well, my flat in London is heated by uranium which generates power which France exports to the UK. Electricity is in fact France's fourth largest export thanks to the 58 nuclear power stations built from 1974 in reaction to the 1973 Arab oil embargo. This program has been a success strategically, environmentally, economically, safetyally (help!) and Germany would do well to substitute its coal-burn, mega-windfarms and heating oil addiction with the wonders of modern nuclear power whose main feedstock is human ingenuity.

And...given the low marginal cost of nuclear generated power, it may be more attractive to displace the internal combustion engine with rechargable batteries. Greens may then boycott 'uranium' cars in favour of gasoline cars. Wankers.

Some of my best friends are penguins

Went to the children's bookstore, bought 'And Tango Makes Three' for my 6yo niece. Nice illustrations of penguins in Central Park Zoo. 'Touching and delightful variation on a major theme' - Maurice Sendak. 'Will delight young readers and open their minds' - John Lithgow. Sit down with said niece and my little daughters. The boy penguins, Roy and Silo, 'didn't spend much time with the girl penguins...instead Roy and Silo wound their necks around each other.."They must be in love"' Non-bigot zoo-keeper slips them an egg, which they incubate, hatch and parent. 'Tango was the very first penguin in the zoo to have two daddies.' So turns out the book is straight propaganda for homosexual adoption with the elegant twist that you can't know that until you read it. (By the way the happy gay penguin marriage was broken by a female called Scrappy tho that's not mentioned in the book).

So this is an impressively multilayered lie aimed at children. There's no evidence that the animals were homosexual. Male penguins incubate eggs. One of the penguins mated with a female. The animals were in an utterly artificial setting. The book is packaged to deceive.

By the way, can I have the beautiful word 'gay' back? It's a family name in my family, short for Grace. Lying to children is neither gay nor gracious.

The BBC does Mormon

The BBC correspondent in Bubble, DC, is one of the most self-important people in the world, so "Is America ripe for a Mormon president?" should be definitive as dogma for bien pensants. The signal to snide ratio is about 50/50, but the piece shows the confusion in attitudes of a liberal who 'gave 10 minutes' to encounter real, decent people who subscribe to a worldview anathematized by other secular cardinals . He deals with the conflict by piling on against his version of the other Christian nuts who dominate America.

Le weekend

I took a couple of grown up daughters and a couple of friends to Paris for the weekend. The 2.5 hour train from city-centre to city-centre is great, tho it would have taken as long to wait for a cab at Gare du Nord as the rest of the journey. Incroyable! My experienced nr.3 daughter led us down the Metro at midnight. What surprised me was how friendly the Parisians were. Smiles in every bar and eaterie, English spoken, quite other than the Paris of old. I believe it's a conscious change and I congratulate them.

'War on Terror' = 'Bunch of Inept Scuffles'

John Hawkins springboards off a story 'Brits Afraid To Use The Phrase, "War On Terror"' to conclude that:

the Brits of old are fading away and being replaced with people who have more in common with Spain or Italy than they do with their cousins across the pond. That's part of the reason that I think our "special relationship" with the Brits probably won't last much longer than Tony Blair's time in office.

I'll springboard off that with my British reply :

1. John Hawkins' understanding of the UK is probably based on filtered news. When PC stuff happens it's mocked and exposed and there's a strong British cadre in the war party, eg Melanie Phillips, Christopher Hitchens and Mark Steyn (I don't care about his passport, he's British).
2. The BBC and much of the bureaucracy IS screwed. Things can change fast though with the right leadership. Blair did a fine job on Iraq, but that policy stood outside a coherent conservative philosophy. Contrast Thatcher.
3. It IS amazing to me how feeble are voters and parties in the US and the UK. All 3 big parties in the UK are essentially anti-Bush in the most jejune way.

At bottom it's down to leadership within a credible philosophy. Bush, whom I much admire as a man, isn't credible on immigration or spending. Blair, Brown, Cameron (Conservative leader, the most pathetic creep of a politician I've come across) aren't credible as conservatives or patriots. But remember that when forceful leadership took us into Iraq, both electorates responded patriotically. The enthusiasm evaporated because the the post invasion policies ignored the regional context and were weak. Eg Syria and Iran needed terrorizing and al-Sadr needed killing. The Iraq conflict was successfully portrayed as a bunch of inept scuffles preceding an exit without honour. Bush and Blair needed to make it a war to the death with Islamofascism, fought like we mean it. WWII could never have been prosecuted as just a fight for Norwegian ports or Polish freedom.

The risible Insiders' Surrender Group report may provoke a rethink whether the 'War on Terror' is a war against an enemy who wants to kill/enslave us or a local operation in Iraq.

Melanie Phillips :

The ISG report, and his reaction to it, has now ruptured .. consensus management. The big question now is whether Bush has the capacity to follow through, to rise above his warring advisers and follow his moral instincts — to emerge from being a weak chief executive to become a world leader and statesman. In the dying fall of his presidency, does he have the wherewithal to go for broke? On this lonely and frail figure the fate of the free world now depends.

Deep pockets and long arms

God, I'm sick of politics. The only things that make sense are chess and sport. If anyone out there cares, here's a long interview with Jose Mourinho, the super-competent, super-confident manager of Chelsea Football Club. which is owned by the super-rich, super-shrewd Roman Abramovich. If you skim over the inside-soccer material (tho fascinating to me), there are insights of self knowledge and team management with zero therapy-speak. Mourinho is affectionately mocked as "The Special One". He'd been an average player who managed an unfashionable club, Porto, to victory in the Champions' League - aka the European Cup, the most prestigious title in club football - and is on track to make Chelski the top club in the world. Abramovich bought the fashionable but underperforming London club in 2003 and hired Mourinho in 2004. Chelsea then won their first English league title in 50 years, then did it again the next year. Abramovich has spent about a billion dollars on the club. It is hard to dream up a more fabulous life than his, a Jewish orphan who is now the richest Russian. He's 40.

The Utility of Useless

Do you remember the judgement of Anna Diggs Taylor against the NSA surveillance program with arguments so thin and embarrassing that it made the Administration's case for it? The Baker report does that for the Victory Strategy in Iraq, Iran and Syria. It holds up the unreality of ancien regime 'realism' for the world to mock.

God may not play dice, but he has a sense of humour to have timed this report to coincide with the anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

Are Germans Cowards ?

Many instances from the World Wars and the brave performances over the decades in the World Cup suggest not, but the question arises from an incoherent, rambling article in Der Spiegel : Are the Germans Stationed in Afghanistan Cowards ? 2 extracts :
'The Germans at NATO headquarters in Kabul now face open hostility: They're mocked as cowards and cop-outs. Some Europeans "obviously resist the idea that you have an army in order to fight. And I have very little patience for that," says the US ambassador to Afghanistan, Ronald Neumann. Neumann wants the Germans to join in the fighting -- and the dying, if necessary -- in southern Afghanistan.'
...
'And the Germans in the north? It may be a little cowardly to stay up there and radiate a feeling of security, dig a few waterholes, calm down a few of the warlords and cultivate trees.

But it may also just be smart.'

Note the Germanic name of the US ambassador.

My in-laws are German-Americans and the interactions between them and their close kin in Germany are fun to watch. The German-Germans, delightful people for the most part, seem pessimistic and cynical about society. One, a fine man who fought on the Eastern Front and has good memories of Americans and American chocolate at the end of the War and who lost his land to the communists, is pretty anti-American. My theory is that Germany is psychologically crippled by unexpiated guilt from history. My theory is that this extends to generations who had no part in the original evil. My theory is that psychological health is restored when national honour is restored by virtuous acts. But Germany has not acted virtuously. At great risk the Allies saved modern Germany from Nazism and Communism. Germans owe their freedom twice over to the courage of the Anglosphere. In return much of Germany sneers at the USA in general and Bush in particular. Neither an individual nor a collective psyche can be in good shape like that.

When we lived in the Hague and drove into Germany, the light became gloomier as we crossed over. People were just unhappier, more private and wore darker clothes. My wife felt the same.

So my advice to Germany is 'Regain your self-respect. Stand by those who stood by you (that's not France by the way).'

See also - "The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity."